China's Cyber Dam (Wall Street Journal)

China's Cyber Dam

'Filtering' software takes censorship to a new level.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124509428540716119.html

| From today's Wall Street Journal Asia.

Information empowers people, and no one knows this better than China's censors. Their latest brainstorm -- to install Big Brother software on every computer in China -- is certainly ambitious. But it is ultimately a losing battle.

This newspaper broke the story of the mandatory filtering software, known as Green Dam, last week. Beijing claims the software -- the name is a pun on "to filter" in Chinese -- is a simple porn filter designed to protect children from viewing sexual content online. "The government . . . regulates the Internet according to law so as to safeguard the interests of the public and prevent the spread of harmful content," a spokesman said last week.

The reality is more sinister. Recent studies show the software can easily be adapted to act as spyware (although it is not currently formatted to do so). A report out Friday from the OpenNet Initiative, set up by Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and the University of Toronto, finds that Green Dam can monitor activities outside of Web browsing and can terminate applications.

The trigger for these mechanisms includes a blacklist of terms that includes politically sensitive topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre and Falun Gong, a banned religious sect. The porn-busting software is somewhat less rigorous: It's designed to filter out flesh-colored images, and as a result ends up shutting down pictures of Hello Kitty and Garfield.

The software is made in China -- sort of. Green Dam was primarily developed by Zhengzhou-based Jinhui with help from the People's Liberation Army's Information Engineering University and the Ministry of Public Security. California-based software company Solid Oak, which develops porn-filtering programs for kids, says Green Dam copied pieces of its code. Jinhui denies these charges.

Whatever the software's provenance, the advent of Green Dam creates a dilemma for foreign companies invested in China. Computer makers that install the program face fallout if it makes their computers malfunction and could also have to deal with a possible PR hit back home. Those that don't could be penalized by the Chinese government, which hasn't yet laid out clear guidelines. Some companies, such as Beijing-based Lenovo Group, which owns IBM, aren't taking the chance and have already complied. Dell, among other companies, says it is still "reviewing" the policy.

China is a big market and the purpose of doing business there is to make money for shareholders, not engage in policy debates. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! censor out certain words to avoid being blocked.

Ultimately it will be the Chinese people who reject their cyber censors. In that sense, the widespread condemnation of Green Dam is encouraging. School teachers report in online forums that they are unable to access news stories and course material. Other online forums are filled with griping about the software glitches and cost of the program -- some 41 million yuan ($6 million) -- which the government paid to Jinhui in a nontransparent process. A survey of 26,232 people on Web portal Sina.com found that more than 80% of respondents did not support Green Dam. One Web site running a petition against the software reports it has collected more than 7,000 signatures. Even state-run media have run critical articles.

Protest is coming through more formal channels as well: In Beijing, lawyer Li Fangping has formally requested the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for a public hearing on the software. "This is such an important matter that we hope they will hold a public hearing, including regular citizens, academics, lawyers, software developers, computer technicians and other relevant people, to meet together to discuss this problem," he told us by telephone. He is still waiting for a response.

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No country in the world has gone to such great lengths to control online content as what China has proposed with Green Dam. Although questions remain about how it will be implemented, it appears to be one of the most intrusive filtering technologies ever mandated for use on a large scale. The great effort China puts into its censorship regime shows how much the Communist Party still fears online dialogue. But as the public backlash against this software shows, it can be very hard to shut down a flow of ideas once the dam has been opened.